by Robert P. Kaye<\/p>\n
Ethan stepped outside on the morning of the third day of the Incident, circumnavigating a wad of damp blankets and cardboard, the shucked cocoon of a denizen of the street and a reminder that a mere shrug of the earth could reduce an entire population to similar wreckage. The faint bite of urine tingled in the cool air as he made his way to the far edge of the portico. A gust of freezing drizzle sprinkled his face as he approached the plastic ashtray positioned well away from the back door of the Emergency Operations Center — the EOC — the city\u2019s high tech cathedral of disasters. Breaks like these allowed him some perspective; the cloud-shredded views of distant mountains proof that each individual constituted an infinitesimal molecule trapped in a vast ocean of events.<\/p>\n
He lit the last of the three cigarettes allocated to each twenty-four hour period, more than three the reputed threshold to addiction. This one tasted of fine burgundy aged in smoky barrels, the neurotransmitter rush a peek into the abyss. Sleep deprivation contributed to the not unpleasant hyper-reality reminiscent of college experiments with acid.<\/p>\n
So far, the Incident comprised no more than a series of practical jokes that nobody could guarantee did not emanate from some obscure Fed agency fucking with them. A \u201cpenetration test.\u201d Or, as somebody called it, \u201cforeplay before cyber rape.\u201d So far, Ethan was having a blast, though it wouldn\u2019t do to admit this inside.<\/p>\n
\u201cMind if I bum one?\u201d<\/p>\n
Ethan stifled his startle reflex. Nobody had joined him on the sidewalk for days, even the grizzled old cops converted to nicotine patches, energy drinks or yoga, unwilling to leave the bunker for fear of missing something. Emergency junkies one and all. \u201cSure thing,\u201d Ethan said, shaking out a coffin nail — he loved the archaic lingo.<\/p>\n
The man selected a cigarette as if they might vary in size or taste as Ethan scanned him for a badge, detecting not even a lanyard. On the second day, an alphabet soup of outsiders — FEMA, FBI, HSD, NSA — had descended upon the EOC. This guy looked like one of the grey suits who\u2019d evicted Homeland Security from the secure conference room, sealing the doors, creating a bunker within a bunker. The man\u2019s grey disheveled hair, rumpled suit and loose backwards-twisted tie set him apart from the rest of the team, all apparently twenty years his junior and capable of running a marathon in formation while juggling knives betwixt them. This man looked desiccated and brittle. The Boss. \u201cSo — how\u2019s it going in there?\u201d Ethan asked.<\/p>\n
For the past three days, an unidentified \u201cBad Actor\u201d — Ethan used to laugh at the term, picturing some hapless Saturday Night Live<\/em> alumnus butchering King Lear<\/em> — had sent untraceable text messages calling their shots:<\/p>\n 19:00, lights out on Broadway, two minutes.<\/em> Upon the hour, bang! the designated neighborhood darkened. Power restored 120 seconds later.<\/p>\n 08:30, rush hour break, Spring to Pine, ten minutes.<\/em> In mid-commute, traffic lights gridlocked for 600 seconds before resuming normal cycles.<\/p>\n 21:00, Sesame Street + Playboy Channel, twenty minutes.<\/em> At the appointed hour, Big Bird and Oscar replaced the image of a panting threesome, observed by the fine men and women viewing porn together on the gigantic plasma screen. Ethan erupted in laughter in appreciation of the intruder\u2019s comic timing, but he chortled alone, everyone else\u2019s sense of humor evaporated.<\/p>\n \u201cYou want to know how it\u2019s going?\u201d The grey man lit up, squinting and baby coughing at the first bite of smoke. \u201cRead the press releases.\u201d He aimed two fingers at Ethan\u2019s chest and leaked smoke through lips thin and puckered as an old scar.<\/p>\n \u201cI write the press releases,\u201d Ethan said. He had since the second day, when a FEMA high rafter bat asked him to sleep on site instead of rotating with his less creative Public Information teammates.<\/p>\n \u201cI know.\u201d The suggestion of a smile said, I\u2019m messing with you.<\/em><\/p>\n The thrill of recognition almost misdirected Ethan from the adroit avoidance of his question. He decided to take another run at it. \u201cAny closer to ID-ing the perp?\u201d he said. ID-ing the perp? <\/em>Ethan groaned inwardly at the lingo marking him as a civilian TV viewer instead of an insider. He chose not to react to the man\u2019s cocked head and bemused smile. The best way to cover a gaffe was to move forward. Never look back.<\/p>\n He held his breath.<\/p>\n The man shrugged, drew another puff. \u201cI shouldn\u2019t.\u201d He raised the cigarette as evidence and examined it as if posing for a circa 1954 ad in Life magazine. \u201cThose guys would give me no end of shit,\u201d he gestured to the glass, \u201cif they weren\u2019t working their asses off. You\u2019re a bad influence, my friend.\u201d<\/p>\n My friend.<\/em> Ethan waited. He\u2019d heard an ex-special ops guy say that time and silence constituted the best interrogation technique ever devised. The plastic ashtray, cabled to a support pillar, had a design like an upside down hypodermic needle. Butts inserted into the small hole in the neck dropped into the locked base to frustrate scavengers — effective, if mean spirited. Ethan missed old fashioned ashtrays with raked sand, like tiny beaches, which lent an air of luxury to the act of smoking and facilitated the recycling of used tobacco.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m a fan of your work,\u201d the man in grey said. \u201cYou\u2019ve got some chops.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThanks.\u201d Pride unclenched within until he recalled Twain\u2019s observation about the only three types of people susceptible to flattery being men, women and children. \u201cNot a lot to write about, is there?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTherein resides the art.\u201d He stabbed the ember of the cigarette toward Ethan\u2019s chest like a practice stroke toward a dart board. \u201cThis you know.\u201d<\/p>\n Ethan took a chance and extended his hand. \u201cEthan Solvanger.\u201d<\/p>\n The man craned his head to peer through the building glass, which admitted light, but did not permit its escape. They shook — a brief catch and release. \u201cCall me Laramie,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cYou from Wyoming?\u201d Ethan asked.<\/p>\n \u201cNot really.\u201d<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n On the fourth day, the under-edge of downtown felt post-apocalyptically deserted. It took Ethan a moment to recognize the steady state of a normal Sunday afternoon, not the aftermath of some unnoticed disaster visited upon the land while the attention of those inside remained hyper-focused elsewhere.<\/p>\n The spillways on a dam upstream from the metro region had opened six hours before, the dispatched crews requiring thirty-three desperate minutes to find the right manual shut off valve — three minutes after the automated floodgates closed under unauthorized remote control. Things had tipped serious, the unnamed bad guys demonstrating virtuoso mastery of a portfolio of threat vectors. Legions of Chinese, Korean, and Ukrainian hackers flailed against firewalls day and night to no avail, while these characters had their god-like fingers poised above the right buttons, driving the cybersecurity gurus inside nuts.<\/p>\n Laramie stood in his usual spot.<\/p>\n \u201cSo how\u2019d you get into this particular branch of show business?\u201d Laramie asked after they lit up.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 2004 Pacific tsunami,\u201d Ethan said. \u201cWorking as a dive instructor at a resort in Thailand. I was twenty meters down with a party of tourists and the wave lifted us maybe five meters in a big ellipse and set us back in the same place like puppets on strings. Wiped out most of the town, but the resort was OK.\u201d He recalled the feeling of suspension from a tether bent around a point in space, plucked by a force deep within the earth and hundreds of miles away. The wire still resonated. \u201cThe power — you know?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYeah.\u201d Laramie shrugged. \u201cI know.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI stuck around to help out.\u201d Ethan made sure he curtailed any blather about Rachel, his girlfriend at the time and a fellow dive instructor. She\u2019d run to the roof of the two-story guest house and watched the water rise almost to the top, the walls shaking like paper in a typhoon. The surge subsided, leaving her unharmed but unable to trust the world even on a sunny day. \u201cGuess I got hooked.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEmergency management is like crack cocaine,\u201d Laramie said. \u201cIrregular intervals of intense stimulation surrounded by vast spells of boredom. Hard to quit and hell on the personal life.\u201d He took another puff, lizard eyes narrowing against the smoke and chuckled. \u201cIf you\u2019ve still got one of those.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLove it,\u201d Ethan laughed — he wasn\u2019t sure why. Maybe in appreciation of Laramie\u2019s exquisite detachment. \u201cAny progress?\u201d He gestured inside.<\/p>\n \u201cAll under control.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cReally?\u201d Ethan\u2019s spirits lifted in a way that revealed a surprising level of desperation.<\/p>\n \u201cYeah. Just not our<\/em> control.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYeah.\u201d Ethan laughed, trying to sound convincing. He\u2019d continued the dive, enjoyed the tropical fish and the coral though he\u2019d seen it all many times before. The shifting plates of the earth seeming to fuse the reef\u2019s beauty into supernatural clarity. Nobody had ever asked why he hadn\u2019t headed back right away, perhaps assuming that he hadn\u2019t identified the nature of the wave. But he knew from the instant it passed through him.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n On the fifth day, at 02:33 hours, Ethan contemplated lighting his fourth cigarette. The filtered air inside the high tech womb of a building had turned septic with frustration. Ten minutes before, he thought he heard the soft echo of somebody crying over the snicker of keyboards and crackle of keyed radios and it sounded too much like Rachel on the other side of the bathroom door.<\/p>\n At midnight, the Bad Actors — they still had no better handle — shut down the regional power plant, as declared via text message, which, for the first time, omitted a resumption deadline. The plant remained offline for an excruciating forty-three minutes and thirty-seven seconds, while debates raged over what kind of ransom note they\u2019d receive — piles of money or release of prisoners or withdrawal of troops or whatever. No such demand arrived.<\/p>\n Ethan\u2019s press release blamed the outage on a fictional substation fire and cascading computer-triggered shut downs — not his best work. A few bloggers speculated about possible connections between recent incidents, but nobody added things up correctly. The situation had become too absurd even for the conspiracy freaks.<\/p>\n A couple strolled down the sidewalk slicked by rain, the rail-thin man clutching a bottle in a paper bag, supporting a woman in a beret and quilted purple nylon coat like a walking upright sleeping bag, the two giddy and unstable as young lovers, each step a near miss at tipping over. A disturbance of shadows indicated a deal in process under the steel bridge where little crack vials crunched underfoot in the mornings. The air smelled of ozone, stoplights reflecting off puddles like broken glass. For a moment, Ethan felt submerged in a giant fishbowl, awaiting a shake. He thought about how anything suspended in water describes an ovoid in response to a shock wave, returning to approximately the same place it started. Unless something impeded the transmission of force.<\/p>\n \u201cYou gonna light that?\u201d Laramie said, materializing behind his shoulder.<\/p>\n \u201cHaven\u2019t decided,\u201d Ethan said, striving to project calm.<\/p>\n \u201cMind if I bum another?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBe my guest.\u201d Ethan handed him the pack and watched him light up, Teflon coated and bullet proof. \u201cLaramie\u201d had no personal stake in this city, as far as Ethan knew. But then neither did he, though he\u2019d lived here for half a decade. He\u2019d taken this job because it involved disaster management, the nearest ocean over a thousand miles away. He could walk away at a moment\u2019s notice.<\/p>\n Two men rounded the corner of the building, rolling swaggers indicating they\u2019d forgotten this was a cop shop. One wore a watch cap and puffy coat, the other a jean jacket and blue bandana with a fringe of greasy hair and an overgrown goatee.<\/p>\n \u201cHey man,\u201d Bandana Man pointed a crooked finger to the pack in Laramie\u2019s hand. \u201cYou wanna give me one of those?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou wanna fuck off?\u201d Laramie asked with a slouching grin.<\/p>\n Bandana Man drew himself up to full height, his pockets big enough to contain a knife, or a gun. And if they did, all the cops inside wouldn\u2019t do them any good. The air seemed to offer resistance, as if strained through a regulator. Ethan had the urge to bolt down the street.<\/p>\n Bandana Man inspected Laramie\u2019s slumped frame and grinned, thoroughly unintimidated. And then something — perhaps a shadow swimming in the depths of the blank glass — caused his predatory leer to fade. \u201cJeez, dude,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m just asking. You don\u2019t have to be rude.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t have to be anything,\u201d Laramie said.<\/p>\n \u201cLet\u2019s get the fuck out of here, man.\u201d The guy in the watch cap plucked Bandana Man\u2019s sleeve. \u201cThese dudes are probably cops.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou didn\u2019t have to be so goddamned rude,\u201d Bandana Man said over his shoulder as they hustled away. \u201cIt\u2019s uncalled for.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI wouldn\u2019t have minded if you\u2019d given him a smoke,\u201d Ethan said after the pair cleared the end of the building.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re running low and we just received another candygram.\u201d Laramie handed back the pack. \u201cThey\u2019re shutting down air traffic control.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cChrist,\u201d Ethan said. \u201cCan they do that?\u201d<\/p>\n Laramie deployed his universal shrug. \u201cHow can they do any of this shit?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s the plan?\u201d Ethan said, the gravitational tug of panic testing its grip.<\/p>\n \u201cRide it out.\u201d A bemused smile arrived on Laramie\u2019s face, as if he\u2019d hooked Ethan up to a galvanic response meter, watching the needle. \u201cSame as always.\u201d<\/p>\n Ethan allowed the moment to pass. \u201cI\u2019m supposed to fly to LA over the holidays,\u201d he lied. \u201cMaybe I should drive.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe you should.\u201d Laramie laughed and tapped the ash off his cigarette, which broke apart as it fell toward the cement.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n The threat ended as suddenly as it began, the predictive text messages ceasing without a moral, explanation or parting comment, like an experiment concluded without the scientists sharing their results or showing their faces. Flights resumed, traffic lights functioned and power remained steady. River levels remained constant. Technically, the Incident lasted another day as Ethan scanned news outlets and blogs to see if anyone connected the dots. Nobody did.<\/p>\n The NSA pulled out first. The doors to the conference room remained shut.<\/p>\n Ethan barely puffed to make the cigarette last, knowing Laramie and his crew might have already departed. The morning light already felt a little warm. After this he would quit once and for all. Back away from the edge.<\/p>\n Laramie exited through the door — the only time Ethan had observed him doing so. When offered the pack, the older man raised his palm. \u201cThey\u2019ll give me a ton of shit as it is. You should quit too.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhy\u2019s that?\u201d Ethan thought of Rachel, who\u2019d taken a flight back to the States about a week after the tsunami. They\u2019d never really talked, not that they\u2019d had much chance as Ethan threw himself into the recovery in large part to avoid facing her. They\u2019d discussed marriage just a month before, how many kids they\u2019d wanted, that shit. He had no illusions about who had abandoned whom.<\/p>\n \u201cWeakness in any form is frowned upon,\u201d Laramie gestured to the blank glass walls, \u201cif you want to work for us.\u201d<\/p>\n Ethan recalled the instant of the wave, the instinct to panic, bolt for the surface, risking an embolism or whatever. But he\u2019d hesitated and the energy swung him up and around like a hand rocking a cradle, the wave only dangerous as it rose up out of the sea like some quick monster, impeded by the edge of the continent. If he\u2019d been in the guest house with Rachel it might have hit him full force. Scrambled his DNA. Wrecked him.<\/p>\n He\u2019d finished the dive, pretending not to have recognized the obvious. Remained at sea, disconnected, and somehow been OK, then and ever since.<\/p>\n \u201cI just quit anyway.\u201d He shrugged, drew a last puff and dropped the cigarette down the neck of the skinny plastic ashtray. He wadded the pack into the hole, but it did not stop the thread of smoke from within. He had the odd sensation of return to a beginning, waiting to be lifted.<\/p>\n ROBERT P. KAYE<\/strong>\u2019s stories have appeared in Monkeybicycle<\/em>, Per Contra<\/em>, Staccato Fiction<\/em>, Green Mountains Review<\/em>, decomP<\/em>, Cicada<\/em>, Danse Macabre<\/em>, Snake Nation Review<\/em>, Pindeldyboz<\/em> and elsewhere<\/em>, with nominations for Pushcart, Best of the Web and Story South prizes. His novel Taking Candy from the Devil<\/em>, about failure, coffee, Bigfoot and trebuchets, is published online. Links to these appear at www.RobertPKaye.com<\/a> together with a blog about the collision of technology and literature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Robert P. Kaye Ethan stepped outside on the morning of the third day of the Incident, circumnavigating a wad of damp blankets and cardboard, the shucked cocoon of a denizen of the street and a reminder that a mere … Continue reading